Letter of the Day | Our future doesn’t lie in delving in the past

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The Gleaner of Friday, June 9, had this headline splashed across the front page, ‘Trillions for reparations’. Presumably this is to be compensation for the cruel act of slavery perpetrated on our foreparents, with added damages for the pain and suffering for us, the descendants. So there you have it – trillions.

Will someone please help me understand this fixation on bringing the children of the slavemasters to book. Is this really about righting a wrong, or a means of punishing the slavemasters’ children for the sins of their parents? By seeking trillions from our former slavemasters’ children, aren’t we holding them responsible for the sins of their parents? Ezekiel 8:20 says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” So, what’s going on here? Have we forgotten our Christian principles?

To the best of my understanding, man’s inhumanity to man was not directed solely at Africans, but was common practice of an unenlightened era. Whites enslaved whites, blacks enslaved blacks, and whites enslaved blacks. Guess we missed out on returning the favour.

History has taught us that people were burned at the stakes in the name of the Church. Was it not the practice to hold public hanging, or to have a convict ‘quartered’ (split into four pieces) or boiled in hot oil all for public spectacles? To the persons of that era, these acts seemed quite normal and was even anticipated as a form of entertainment,

The point here is that the way slavery is viewed today is quite different from how it was viewed in the 17th and 18th centuries, when even churches owned slaves. Consider the impact of church owning slaves today.

To be sure, no one reading this article can lay claim to having been a slave. The lessons of slavery should be just that, ‘a lesson’, something we should learn from, but on which we should never become fixated. If we keep looking back, we will never see the opportunities before us. Instead of looking back, let’s use our energies to become creative and industrious, take responsibility for our actions, and pursue our quest at creating a wealthy nation. Our future is in the future, not the past. Only when we have reconciled ourself to the tragedies of our foreparents and use it to propel us forward, can we truly emancipate our minds from the legacies of slavery.

What is done is done! It is time to focus on the future.

PATRICK WALKER